Meet OPAV
As the technical director for Orlando-based OPAV, a live event production company, with specialized experience in nationwide end-to-end production, Ian Paul is a damn nice guy. We were fortunate to spend a few minutes with him the day after he celebrated his ten-year anniversary with the fifteen-year old company.
A Flex customer since early 2017, Ian recounted how it went when he started in 2013. “When I first started at OPAV, I was given handwritten notes on a legal pad with what inventory to pull. I’d load the truck and deliver it all myself.” Have to admit, this is the first we’ve heard of “operations by legal pad.”
Spreadsheets? Sure.
Word docs? Maybe.
But a legal pad? Wow.
“But when we first brought in Flex as our first real stab at getting more professional and organized, there was no looking back.”
In those days, OPAV had one 10,000 square foot warehouse with maybe 500 pieces of inventory coming in and out each day. Now, OPAV has 35,000 square feet of space and is looking to double that. “There’s no aspect of Flex that we don’t use every single day,” Ian explained.
Although Covid had an impact on the company, which fell to six employees after growing to forty, OPAV is back to full operations. More than forty employees are responsible for events like the WJRR Earth Day Festival, Tours for Kevin Hart, corporate events for TD Bank and Reuters Events, and even “Small $15K events with one breakout room and a flipchart.”
OPAV is even in-house at a hotel, which highlights one of Ian’s favorite parts of Flex. “We are consistently challenged with creating new workflows. Flex’s options to create customized structures is astronomically helpful.” (Yup, astronomically. Legal pads and astronomically. Those are going to be the two big takeaways from this chat!)
And now OPAV is working on its biggest event in the company’s history: FlexCon ’23! (NARRATOR: This is not the biggest event OPAV has ever worked on, but we’re slightly biased.) That’s right, we tapped OPAV to help us pull together our upcoming June 12-13 event in Orlando.
This is the rare Spotlight where we get to write from the perspective of the platform and the customer – with the customer using our platform to produce the event. It’s all very meta. Suffice to say, we’ve loved every second of our experience with OPAV. And, in fact, we’re going to be creating “making of” behind the scenes content about building our own event in Flex.
As Ian explained, our relationship works because, “Our relationship is veryfamily-esque.” This is not only true because through the years a couple of OPAV employees have moved over to work for Flex. It’s true because that’s just the way things are done.
As we wrapped things up with a conversation about APIs, we thanked Ian for his time. Because Ian Paul is a good guy – he deflected the gratitude and thanked us instead. This isn’t the first Flex-Customer mutual admiration society moment. We know it won’t be the last.
Thanks, Ian. Thanks, OPAV. See you in Orlando.
Flex is proud to have worked with OPAV to make customers their priority since 2017.
